63

Open my eyes. Look out of my head and that’s the wall there as it had been. Again. I am standing on the floor. Sometimes it seems that I am floating but that’s not floating. It always takes another name between us. It feels good doesn’t it. You are beside me. And I am only one of billions, though this is rarely at the forefront of my mind. Like most it seems there is so much air around me there could never be anybody else and it could go on like this for days or weeks but then again something just happens like I have to go out to the store to buy the food I eat to stay alive and then for a little while I am reminded but not enough. Even in the most massive instances of feeling crowded and fucked and stared at by more flesh that I can stand, there is no feeling like the blackness. I take my hand off of the wall and touch my face. My cheeks are soft but firm like some old apple full of flesh. Most anything can be eaten and become part of another body as you know. Most people don’t think about what was eaten into the body of the body of the thing before the thing before the thing they’re eating but I do. I try not to but I do it. I touch my cheek and think about the mounds of doughnuts and canned clams and beefs and fruits and chocolate I chewed and swallowed to make my fiber. Most of what goes in me comes back out or becomes burned but I can still smell the dinners in my thighs and in my nose bridge. The only thing I love to do is eat, though I never wish for more of me to be made from it. I really know I really am alive. More often than I think about what I am made of I think about what I could consumed by and take part in. I think about being eaten by a bull. Do bulls eat people? I’d be the first one if I could. I imagine their horns struck through my face. I fantasize about the teeth going through my pulpy parts to touch together at the space inside me no one sees. Bulls or snakes or wolves or men or dogs or, shit, giraffes or just whatever. Any of them could come around at any time and take a mouthful of me with them. Then I would go inside their blood and squirm around there and give them energy to move and think and eat more of me or move on. I would come out mostly elsewhere in their shit. The shit would go into the earth again and join the rest and know the seasons. Or someone would wipe it up into a tiny plastic bag and I could live forever sealed inside that not degrading or at least for many hundreds or thousands of years. Seems fine. Seems great. Awesome. Come now. I know you’re there. Help me touch me. Though you never. I always do the touching by myself. I touch my neck, I touch my chest. Do it, I think. Touch me. I don’t even have to hear the words. I can hardly even remember my voice outside me or whatever. My breasts are small and nips are hard. I get so hot sometimes thinking about being eaten, it doesn’t even matter where I am again. Sometimes I become so wet even like in line at a bank or sitting in my car looking at nothing. This room is no different than any other place. I could masturbate here. I could make cream here. I know exactly how I smell. I’m not ashamed. It’s mine. You motherfucker. Touch my tummy. I touch my gut. I pretend sometimes there’s a child in there and I’m the mother and that it matters what I do or how I feel and whether I am breathing smoke in or other toxins. Then I become paranoid even more than usual and start thinking about what I can do to keep the infant cleaner than I am all around it. Like maybe I could put a plastic bag over my head, I think, I could do that and then not be getting stuffed all the time with all the horrors but obviously that’s not something people do. You’d die. And that’s okay that’s fine to me most times but it’s not the point now. The point is even without the teeth I’m being ripped. Plenty of people can go in the world and with babies in them and not worry about what else is getting in and being fed into the future person and their current person but I am not one of those people. The times I’ve tried to make a baby with a person that I loved we either couldn’t or I changed my mind somewhere along the way. It’s not your business when that was or who was buried. A person is a person is a person is a person and that includes you and that includes me and you can’t stop where we are now. Which is where again? Which is where again. There is so much of me to touch and so much space. I could spend the rest of my life just right here touching myself and no one would know the difference including me. Forget the food and space and people watching and B., there’s his name, and anybody else or anywhere else and just stand here rubbing on me like I am just more of any wall. Like one day I’ll learn to rub me back there on the inside, and all I am is just more gesture, and soon my blood itself will learn to want to hold me. I’ll keep waiting. I am only ever always waiting.